This dissertation consists of two essays that study the relevant boundary conditions to the relationship between the customer satisfaction and loyalty. Retaining current customers is critical to a firm's performance and has been well-established in the literature. Extant literature tells us that loyal customers are typically less price sensitive, spend more than non-loyal customers, less expensive to retain, and more importantly, provide new referrals through positive word of mouth. In the first essay, drawing from decision justifiability theory, I posit that consideration set size and price-consciousness moderate the relationship between satisfaction and loyalty. At higher levels of consideration set sizes, the positive relationship between satisfaction and loyalty is likely to be weakened. However, this two-way interaction effect is seen to impact high and low price-conscious consumers differently. Specifically, I show that satisfied, low price-conscious consumers with higher consideration set sizes will be more loyal vis-a-vis high price-conscious consumers with similar satisfaction levels and set sizes. These theoretical hypotheses are tested in four separate studies. Specifically, I use secondary data and three experimental studies. All my hypotheses including the mediating role of decision justifiability are supported. The second essay investigates the role of satisfaction on loyalty intentions for firms that offer both the product and the product-related augmented services. In the industry that I studied for this question, buying a product requires an extraordinarily high capital outlay; however, the profitability of the firm is dependent on the services offered to the customers. The services market is a very competitive market as well in this industry. So, how should a firm manage this portfolio that includes both products and services? I draw and extend the consumption system model proposed by Mittal, Kumar and Tsiros (Journal of Marketing, 1999). Specifically, I propose a curvilinear relationship for both product and services satisfaction on loyalty intentions and posit synergistic interactions between them. I test this model using longitudinal data spanning five years across multiple countries that were obtained from a multinational company. Analyses reveal support for the proposed hypotheses.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ucf.edu/oai:stars.library.ucf.edu:etd-4917 |
| Date | 01 January 2009 |
| Creators | Bindroo, Vishal |
| Publisher | STARS |
| Source Sets | University of Central Florida |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Electronic Theses and Dissertations |
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